Split panes and ‘remembered’ sessions in iTerm2

Sep 29 11 under Altentee | Comments Off

If you’re a mac user and frequently use the terminal, then you should probably have a look at iTerm2.

“Its focus is on performance, internationalization, and supporting innovative features that make your life better.”

Amongst its many features, I love the ability to slit a pane horizontally or vertically. (Command-Shift-D or d) It’s great being able to be logged in to multiple backend servers at once.

Another cool feature is the ability to send commands to all panes in a tab (Alt-Command-I), useful when editing multiple files on multiple servers or starting and stopping services etc.

But the coolest hack I reckon is using applescript to start up iTerm windows and sessions within them. I use something like the following to launch my workspace.

launch "iTerm"
 
tell application "iTerm"
 activate
 
 -- my project workspace
 set myterm to (make new terminal)
 tell myterm
  launch session "varnish"
  set number of columns to 100
  set number of rows to 30
  tell the last session to write text "cd Code/myproject && git pull origin master"
 end tell
 
 -- ssh in split panes to my varnish stack
 set myterm to (make new terminal)
 tell myterm
  launch session "varnish"
  set number of columns to 100
  set number of rows to 60
  tell the last session to write text "ssh vara.cbr"
  tell the last session to write text "varnishlog"
  tell i term application "System Events" to keystroke "D" using command down
  tell the last session to write text "ssh varb.cbr"
  tell i term application "System Events" to keystroke "D" using command down
  tell the last session to write text "ssh varc.cbr"
 end tell
 
 -- ssh in split panes to my apache stack
 set myterm to (make new terminal)
 tell myterm
  launch session "appserver"
  set number of columns to 100
  set number of rows to 60
  tell the last session to write text "ssh appa.cbr"
  tell i term application "System Events" to keystroke "D" using command down
  tell the last session to write text "ssh appb.cbr"
  tell i term application "System Events" to keystroke "D" using command down
  tell the last session to write text "ssh appc.cbr"
 end tell
 
end tell

I did try other session management tools such as tmux, but whilst on OSX, am finding iTerm2 + Applescript perfect for my needs. YMMV.

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